Drug addicts are being paid up to $300 a day to snort prescription painkillers
and rate how enjoyable they are.
Pharmaceutical companies are recruiting thousands of drug abusers in America
to help them develop opioid treatments with properties that could deter
abusers. The medicine could help to turn the tide on a national epidemic of
addiction that kills 45 people a day.
The approach has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA),
which insists that such studies should involve only “experienced”
recreational drug abusers.
Margaret Hamburg, the FDA comm

If ever you were to walk on the surface of Comet 67P, you would find yourself
kicking up 20cm of soft dust — some of it organic compounds of the kind that
construct our DNA.
The scenery around you, which scientists had expected to be cratered and flat,
would instead be like a rocky desert. As in a desert, there would be little
water: 67P’s interior contains less ice and a lot more emptiness than
scientists had ever guessed.
The first results from the Philae lander have been published and they describe
in detail a barren, strange world that has already defied our expect

The ghosts of ancient viruses are being resurrected thousands of years after their extinction as scientists search for reliable ways of treating diseases such as Parkinson’s and cystic fibrosis.
Bio-engineers have built a facsimile of a virus that died out more than 2,000 years ago and hope it will prove a safe vessel for ferrying genetic pick-me-ups into the cells of patients.
Apparently harmless viruses with their reproductive machinery knocked out show great promise for smuggling gene therapies that can treat a range of problems from muscular dystrophy to inherited blindness.
There is a c

It may be time to ignore the faint but nagging fishy scent and embrace the
tang of acid: green tea could help limit your weight gain from starchy
foods, according to a pilot study.
Young adults who had eaten a wafer laced with green tea extract were found to
digest significantly less starch from a bowl of cornflakes than those who
had been given a placebo.
Scientists suggested that drinking several cups with a meal could cut the
calories absorbed from foods such as bread and potatoes, building on a large
but inconclusive body of evidence for green tea’s effects on cond